mPedigree, was selected by KEPHIS and STAK as the strategic technology partner for the Agrotrack Initiative, which has since November 1st 2016 been successfully rolled out across Kenya.
Agrotrack empowers farmers to check whether agro-inputs like seeds and eventually other products are fake or not. For Kenya, a region where agriculture plays major role in the social, economic and cultural lives, this come as very goods news, and the development is bound to impact the lives of more than ten million farmers over the next few years.
Estimates put the prevalence of fake seeds alone at 30% of total local supply in East Africa resulting in failed crops and massive threats to food security. The menace goes beyond crop failure, however. Fake agro-inputs often contain dangerous compounds that contaminate ground water and poison consumers.
Agrotrack is a very clever remedy enabling the authenticity of agro-inputs to be validated in real-time through a cloud-based solution. Farmers and consumers only needed to text the unique 12-digit code, securely applied at source to the pack, to a special SMS hotline (shortcode) for an instant response about the originality of the agro-input and its compliance with KEPHIS standards.
Since the inception of the Kenyan Agrotrack system in 2016 over 20 million retail seed packs have been deployed onto the market, which has in turn safeguarded farmers who depended on those seeds for higher yields in 2017.